Bella Bella is a work of fiction. But I did spend ten days island-hopping in a kayak off British Colombia in 1999, when a large commercial fishing boat was seized off the coast of Vancouver Island. It was carrying over one hundred undocumented Chinese immigrants. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) arrested several members of the crew whom they suspected of smuggling. Authorities discovered that the water used for drinking and cooking the rice for the migrants was contaminated, and that they were sick, hungry, and tired.
And I did meet a scuba diver in the sea next to a fishing boat who offered us a huge geoduck clam; he said he was gathering them for his brother who owned a Chinese restaurant in the city of Vancouver. It was illegal to harvest geoducks at that time. I put this together with the news about undocumented Chinese immigrants seized on a fishing boat, and this was the seed of the idea that led to this novel.
Human smuggling and trafficking is big business in Canada. (There’s a technical difference between the two: trafficking involves forced labor and threats of violence.) But this isn’t limited to Canada. The United Nations (UN) estimates that human smuggling is currently one of the most profitable criminal activities in the world and it’s growing at an alarming pace. There are 2.5 million victims of human trafficking around the world, many of them women and children.
There are an increasing number of migrants fleeing political and religious violence in Africa and the Middle East. In April 2015, a boat from Libya capsized on its way across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy, drowning 800 people. In an ongoing humanitarian disaster that began in 2011, millions of Syrians have fled the violent civil war there, with hundreds of thousands of refugees stranded across Europe as they search for new homes.
Refugees from poor countries like Bangladesh and Myanmar (Burma) often pay unbelievably high prices to human smugglers to be transported to wealthier countries in Southeast Asia, like Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, to escape religious persecution and grinding poverty. In May 2015, 350 Myanmar migrants were refused entry into Thailand and were left stranded on a fishing boat by smugglers off the southern coast.
In oceans and on highways around the world, smugglers are abandoning boats and trucks, taking the money but leaving migrants without food or water, sometimes locked inside with no way to escape.
Desperate migrants all over the world take huge risks and pay their life’s savings to smugglers for a chance at a better life. These migrants are facing a crackdown by border patrols and sometimes armed vigilante groups. And when caught they are often put into harsh detention camps—children, too—and usually deported.
Almost everywhere, the response has been more focused on protecting borders than on protecting the rights of migrants and refugees. As the director of the human rights group Fortify Rights says, “This is a grave humanitarian crisis demanding an immediate response. Lives are on the line.”
There are no easy answers, but answers must be found. Kids can get involved and learn more from organizations such as:
Fortify Rights
International Organization for Migration (run through the UN)
Migrants Rights International
Amnesty International